Kindergarten today. Nothing makes children go completely bananas like windy weather and we had wind and rain in abundance today.
Politic
Continuing from yesterday’s topic. The ludicrous behavior in the senate reached new heights overnight with federal Labor staging a 30+ hour filibuster in attempt to block senate voting reform which has in the end passed anyway. I am a fan of this particular change and I approve it on the basis of expert advice. Preference deals are just one of the shady elements in our Federal politic and removing them for good benefit our democracy even if the consequence in the short term is a LNP majority in both houses. I can’t believe I just wrote that. Nothing good will ever come of the LNP getting a double majority ever again. The very idea is terrifying. The forthcoming election, likely to occur while we are in Scotland, if the PM uses his DD triggers, will be hard fought but presently still looks likely to be won by the buffoons in power at the moment despite their glaring ineptitude and malignance. For now I’m praying that the ALP have hired some competent PR this time around. Their behaviour this week doesn’t lend credence to the idea unfortunately.
Creative
Only managed a sketch an half last night and I’ll be lucky to get that half done tonight. It has been a long and exhausting week.
Finding myself infuriated by the actions of the Federal ALP today. Following their pattern over the last couple of months, ever since it was revealed a number of wet Labor strongholds are now under direct threat from the Greens the ALP have been on the attack and spreading deliberate and disingenuous misinformation about the Greens. Culminating this week in an attempt to derail senate voting reform by suggesting the senate talk, not vote, about gay marriage. Then accusing the Greens of voting against marriage equality all over social media when they sided with government to continue working on the sorely needed senate voting reform. Only today to chicken out of actually voting for marriage equality when given the opportunity.
Such pathetic pollies this batch.
In the US Sanders took a beating on Tuesday and it is now hard to remain hopeful. There remains a chance and given I think it is either him or Trump as the next president I’m going to cling to that hope. I genuinely believe Hillary has no chance against Trump. He will wipe the floor with her like Reagan did to carter in 1980.
I think the way we do sex education in Australia needs a fundamental overhaul
For starters it is done too late. It is not uncommon for students to not have covered this area at school prior to high school biology. Which is long after most children will have begun forming completely erroneous connections about sex, particularly so in the age of internet porn. Ideally a number of fundamentals should have been covered well and truly prior to the embarrassment of puberty setting in. Girls should not be being shocked and frightened by their first periods. Boys need some lessons in hygiene and safety. Safety, both personal and public is the fundamental basis of this idea.
All children need to be explicitly taught what consent means, how it can be offered, when it can be taken away and what the responsibilities of each party is at every step of the way.
All children need to be made aware that ‘normal’ encompasses a huge and divergent variety of body types, relationships, attractions and desires.
All children need to be taught something of the nature of what is taboo in our culture and why. They should not be learning that bestiality is wrong from South Park first. See also ‘Consent’, again.
I am very grateful that I underwent puberty prior to ubiquitous smartphone ownership. The trauma and embarrassment was quite sufficient without preserving it forever in digital archives. Sex ed for me was high school biology and a little health. It was dull, embarrassing and pretty forgettable. I have seen only a few examples of any human biology and reproduction taught in my time as a teacher and I have explicitly delivered no such content. It has not been in my curriculum, I have argued for its inclusion a number of times, particularly when working with older grades but I have not won those arguments. I have read parts of the forthcoming ACARAhealth curriculum and I am pleased to see sex ed included from middle primary onwards. But I do seriously question how many schools will implement that particular curriculum, let alone allocate class time and teach it in the memorable and interesting way it deserves.
I think that many teachers are afraid that the public is more puritanical than they actually are, or that there are a few particularly vocal and zealous parents who will make trouble for them and the faculty if this content is introduced in primary schools.
Arming our children with the knowledge to experiment safety when they are old enough is to my mind far better than sending our children into puberty unarmored. If done well in time organisations like Safe Schools wouldn’t even be necessary and we might even put a dint in the frighteningly high rate of teen suicide in this country.
An example of Sex Ed done right. This is delivered for 8 year olds.
Daily
Swimming, painting, eating Ice Cream talking to friends on the phone. A good day with yet more painting to do.
This thread and the raw deal we get out of our current provider have had us reconsidering our private health insurance. Of note is the claim by one commenter that ten years of continuous coverage can reset the loading on premiums back to the base rate, even after many years of 2% per year loading has accumulated. That is unverified at this point. But if true it would mean that if for instance we went without private cover for fifteen years we would need to pay cover plus 30% for ten years and then it would reset to base cover rate. That is still pretty crap and it could be subject to change, or be completely untrue. Also of interest is the suggestion by a number of people that an enforced savings plan of say 75% of monthly premiums into a savings account can effectively cover all that the insurance is likely to and in some cases much more. This would only be a suitable option for us when incomes are more stable and much higher.
As it stands we don’t really use our insurance very much. We only have extras to get dental and even that is largely unused. My eldest A is going through the process of bracers and without my parents help we couldn’t achieve that. Our insurance gives a maximum of $300 back per calendar year on orthodontics. We investigated moving to an insurer who would provide more but the cost far outweighed the return. We have already received this year’s $300 which went to my father. Both N and I will undergo dental checkups prior to departure but during our time in Europe we are going to pay $800+ in unused insurance premiums.
I am morally opposed to the private healthcare system. It is the hatchet with which the Libs wish to destroy socialised healthcare in Australia and it is a great fiscal cost to our society. But waiting periods suck I understand why people want to pay to skip them. In truth the only reason I have cover at all is because of the 2% loading, We don’t earn enough to have to worry about the extra tax.
Really not sure what we we’ll do about that this evening.
Found a rather cool flight search tool, it requires the assistance of a travel agent to finalise but we have found flights a full thousand dollars cheaper than anywhere else using it and yes that is including taxes, fees to be determined. We have an agent working on our behalf so with any luck we will be able to buy tomorrow.
New computer should also arrive tomorrow.
The day with kindergarten, tutoring, some wiring on the chook tractor, dinner, dishes, bed time and flight searching has left me with nothing left to put in creatively tonight.
I have a collection of videos that make my palms sweaty, make my heart race, leave me gasping.
No you filthy apes!
Videos like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ8jkZQxyjA
and this
and this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH7bJAMLBYQ
Videos that make me question why on earth would anyone do something so indescribably stupid?
I’ve got tons more.
The comment I make, concerning particularly the latter type involving pointless self endangerment, is that at no point in my entire life have I had such confidence in my own body.
Upon reaching the conclusion that it is that which I enjoy about watching these vids, I have set out to develop such self confidence by degrees.
Rest assured I will never be doing such patently stupid stunts. I do want to feel sure that I could hang one handed and recover. I do want to feel sure that I could precision jump a gap, or balance on a bar if I ever needed to and hell I definitely intend to never need too. This is one of the reasons I set about working out all those months ago. I have made progress but I am not even nearly done.
Daily
Success, the laptop lives again. But for how long we know not. I am hoping it will survive through Europe after which I can build a desktop worthy of the now traditional name for my computers: Hex.
I have two days work with year ones at the local Catholic school starting tomorrow. Feeling rather excited to get back into the classroom.
Creativity
I spent what little time I had off from children today getting the computer going. Transferred working files over from N’s computer, the castle card progress is intact, unfortunately storybook progress has reverted somehow, hopefully a more thorough search will find the current working version, if not yesterday’s labours need repeated.
This link and the discussion around it nearly took top billing for tonight’s post. Automation will wait for another evening, Boston Dynamics latest bot will not.
A workout, another trip to the NSW transport office as they forgot to photocopy the licence they cut a hole in yesterday and a lesson for two brothers this afternoon.
The new solid state hard disk arrived with the morning post. So far three attempts to clone the old drive have failed due to system restarts. A few more tries are necessary before we give up. Investigating things for my ‘Best Man’ responsibilities this evening.
Creative
An hour or two each devoted to the Castle card and my story book today. Found reference images for every illustration page of the book. Sorted out the line weight issue and fixed an area as well as making progress elsewhere in the image.
Media
Watched ‘What We Do In The Shadows’ last night. It was certainly quite funny at times, but I was hoping for better. Maybe I just don’t find that kind of thing as amusing anymore. Plenty of the gags rely on the gruesome nature of vampiric survival and lots of those fell a bit flat with N and I. The rolling set fight scene was pretty impressive and the characters were very well realised. Maybe earlier in the vampire hype train it would have been better received.
I was bullied in school. Specifically I was called ‘gay’ from year 6 until I left to attend Tafe after year 10. That was a pretty miserable time and although I no longer bear a chip on my shoulder about them I have little desire to know or rebuild relationships with many of my high school peers. I know others who still bear the emotional scars from high school decades later. The fact that I am not and have never identified as gay didn’t help matters any at the time. Nor for that matter did the fact that thanks to my upbringing I didn’t consider being gay as in any way wrong, I had gay relatives and family friends after all. The bullies found a label that worked and stuck to it. Nothing, even obvious evidence to the contrary swayed their opinion of me. Bullying wasn’t at the time even acknowledged as a thing schools should be acting on, this was pre-columbine after all. The pendulum has certainly swung on that one. Though having done quite a lot of reading on the topic the best management strategy I know of is “The Method of Shared Concern“. Like many such issues prohibition and punishment doesn’t solve the problem.
Homophobia is still rife in Australian education systems. There has certainly been a growing acceptance and permissiveness for bi, gay and lesbian students within the cities, trans and other students less so. However even at the primary level it is not yet accepted as ‘normal’ and children so desperately want to be just that. Rural areas are seemingly a few years behind culturally.
I now take it as a practical law of nature that the more rabidly homophobic a public figure is the more likely they are to be compensating for an insatiable lust for buggery. I have zero problem with politicians having wild kinky sex in a manner that fulfills them. But I take deep issue with hypocrites who use their positions to hold back social progress and actively limit the rights of other citizens. Someday I feel sure, Senator Bernardi will be exposed and I will toast his downfall.
I even have the capacity to plug the drives themselves in elsewhere with handy cords. I can access the primary drive for an inconsistent twenty seconds or so before it resets and windows helpfully asks if I want to format the drive in order to use it. I have grabbed a few important things off the drive that way just to tide me over until I download the rest from Backblaze.
Still I’m pretty crushed and demoralised by it all. Struggling to see a way in which I can purchase a worthwhile laptop pre-Europe. Loans are unlikely due to the instability of my income, hire is for chumps. I am going to have to sell something big to achieve this and I’m going to have to do so without my primary creative tool.
In the mean time N and I will share her desktop which is her primary photography processing tool. For reasons still unclear her desktop restarts between 2 and 12 times a day at random intervals and with no clear trigger, so this is not an ideal solution. Event logging has yielded no explanation for the restarts so far and we have tried a huge variety of fixes to no discernible effect.
Adding to my frustration NSW Ed got back to me today and, in direct contradiction to the first enrollment officer I spoke to, asked for scans of certified copies of my ID and university documents. The first enrollments officer said that scanned originals were clearly superior and the second ‘jobsworth’ grudgingly acknowledged that a scan of a certified photocopy is an uncertified digital document and therefore worthless but that’s what the system needs. Fortunately I have a fairly large collection of certified copies and was able to scan and send them today. But it means it is likely to be at least another week before I get any progress on permission to teach in NSW. Another week without earnings beyond the meager supplemental income my tutoring is bringing in.
Thanks to the computer troubles and playing primary carer while trying to polish off the final rough edges of the unpack as well as clean up some of the grime our two darlings spread everywhere they go I’ve had limited creative success today. I have managed to recover the progress I made on a perspective reference model for the castle card in Sketchup, which is a relief. But I haven’t even begun installing Sketchup, tablet drivers and Manga Studio on this comp.
Some good news arrived in the form of my key ring showing up in West End so we will soon have a second car key again.
by 
